


A Fixed Point

by eirabach



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, Captain Swan AU Week 2016, Companion Killian, F/M, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, I'm Sorry, Mild Smut, Stream of Consciousness, Time Lady Emma, Time Loop, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-15
Updated: 2016-08-19
Packaged: 2018-07-24 05:09:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7495086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eirabach/pseuds/eirabach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He never remembers, and she can't forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Fixed Point

**Author's Note:**

> Somebody (I cannot seem to find the post because I am useless) once made a beautiful TimeLady!Emma edit. Clearly this was playing on my mind at 3am, along with the concept of fixed points, fated love, lifespan discrepancies, and memory wipes. So I mixed it up with a whole bunch of stream-of-consciousness and parenthesis, and dropped you in at the end (beginning) of a story. Sorry.
> 
> For AU week day one, crossover. Captain Swan x Doctor Who. TimeLady!Emma and Companion!Killian. Sort of. Ish.

Boston in November is cold and damp, the ocean too grey and squally to do much to calm a troubled mind, so he drags himself to the dingiest bars instead, and tries to drown his sorrows in rum, and the sound of other people’s laughter. But rum is expensive, and work is short this time of year, and one glass is never enough.

Nothing ever is.

He doesn’t notice her at first. Later, he wonders how that could be, how she could exist in the world - any world - and he not be attuned to her presence. Later, he’ll be astounded that there was ever a day when he didn’t feel his heart beat in time with hers, an invisible cord strung between them that vibrates and hums and twinges painfully whenever they’re apart.

Later.

For now, he’s more interested in his rum.

So interested, in fact, that her hand is on his knee and her breath is at his ear before he cares enough to drag his eyes from the dregs of the amber liquid. She’s close enough to feel long before he knows her name.

(That’s a story of their lives, perhaps. One of them.)

“If you’re trying to mug me, I’m afraid you’re shit out of luck.”

He grumbles it to her hand as it rests on his knee, to the stark line of her tailored suit that seems so incongruous in a Boston dive bar, not meeting her eyes even as he can feel the way they seem to burn him.

“Shame. What about a kidnapping?” she asks, and his tired eyes finally make it to her face. She’s beautiful, an alcoholic flush across her cheeks, white blonde curls escaping what used to be a severe bun. Her eyes are greener than any he’s seen before, greener, and older, and wiser, and she looks at him like she knows him. Like she wants him. Then she smiles, bright and wide, and it looks like hope.

It’s _terrifying_.

He tosses back the last of his rum, something more than alcohol buzzing in his ears, as his body tries to warn him to run. She looks down to his empty glass that magnifies the splits and whorls in the wood of the bar top.

“Can I get you a drink?”

He’s no stranger to come-ons from strange women, but he’s never met one that lays out their cards so early (so disturbingly). The hairs on the back of his neck stand up, the muscles in his thighs going taunt as his body prepares for fight or flight, but those green, green eyes stop him. There’s no idle flirtation in their depths. He recognizes lust, and loneliness, sure enough (he sees them often enough in his own mirror), but there’s something else there. Something that keeps him in his seat, makes him sit up a little taller. Constellations, he thinks. He doesn’t know why.

(Later, later, later.)

“So you can kidnap me?” he lets the corner of his mouth tick up, “That wouldn’t be very clever of me, would it?”

She purses her lips, wrinkling her nose slightly as if she hadn’t quite considered that possibility. “What if I told you you’d like it?”

He quirks an eyebrow at that, quite a different biological reaction beginning to take hold.

“You do,” she says, red lips twisting into the smallest of smiles, “I promise.”

He grins in spite of himself, his cheeks aching from disuse. “You’re mad.”

She bites at her lip, a strange combination of coquetry and innocence, “You like that too.”

God help him, but he does.

It’s drizzling as she drags him outside, her hair frizzing into a golden halo as he turns and presses her back against the alleyway wall, damp crawling down the back of his neck as he dips his head to kiss lipstick smears across her jaw.

“Why me?” he pants, his cold fingers struggling with the fastenings of her tuxedo jacket, “Why now?”

Her hands are hot against his belly, almost scalding in the way they run over touch starved flesh, “You looked lonely.”

He pulls back, bitter pride bristling at being anybody’s pity fuck, but it’s not pity he sees in those wide, honest eyes. It’s his own pain, reflected back at him a hundredfold.

_I’m lonely_ , those eyes say, _come back to me_.

He’d come back to her a hundred times, if only he'd known he’d ever left. Someone must have left her, though. Someone looked into those eyes, and turned away.

“Who was he?”

_A fool_ , he answers himself, _a monster_.

She smiles, a sad, broken little thing that makes his heart clench, and by god he doesn’t even know her name.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says, “I’m always on my own, in the end.”

He knows how that feels, right enough. Knows it in the press of a mother’s ring to his chest, and the play of bright scars across his arm.

“As for why now,” she draws her hand from under his shirt, reaching up to tilt his chin down, looking at him with that odd intensity he’d seen back at the bar. He sets his lips in a thin line, waiting to be judged and found wanting, “it’s a fixed point. I always come here. This always happens. Over and over… I try to stop it, but…” she smiles, but it’s weak. Heartbroken. “I always find you.”

It sounds like fate, like predestination, like this is not some hook-up in an alleyway but the work of the universe. It sounds like nonsense, but her eyes are on his, and he can’t look away.

“I don’t believe in fate,” he tells her.

“Oh good,” the smile changes into something genuine, something blinding that makes him want to see nothing else for the rest of his days, “neither do I.”

“And just who are you?” he asks even as he falls back into her, magnetized.

She hums as he runs his nose down the line of her throat. “No-one.”

He can feel the throb of her pulse and it’s too fast, out of sync in a way he can’t quite put his finger on, so he presses his tongue against it instead.

“Liar,” he runs a thumb over her breast, shifting his weight as she sways into him as if he knew she would. He catalogues the catch in her breath and the way her eyelashes flutter as he moves lower, and he knows this. Knows her.

“The Savior,” she gasps, hot fingertips reaching for his belt buckle as if she’s done this a million times (she’s done this a million times), “they call me the Savior.”

The word sends a jolt through him, it feels familiar, and right, and wrong all at once.

(That’s what _they_ call her. Not him.)

He sees constellations behind his closed eyes, a blanket of stars and her hair fanned out above her, universes at their feet, and he pauses to let the beat of her heart play out against his mouth.

_Ba (ba) dum (dum)._

_Hearts_ , he thinks wildly, _hearts_.

“What do I call you,” he says, and it’s hardly a question, the tremble of her hands at his fly barely an answer.

“You always forget,” she says, in a voice as miserable as it is matter-of-fact, “I always remember, Killian, and you always forget.”

She remembers the name he never gave her, and her skin is softer than silk beneath her shirt.

She remembers, and he doesn’t.

(Nothing was ever enough, until her.

After her.

How could it be?)

The raindrops in her hair glitter like stardust when he looks at her, really looks at her, and says the words she’s waiting to hear.

“So remind me.”

She steps away, and he thinks for a moment she’s going to leave him - shirt untucked, flies undone, half-hard and confused as fuck in a dirty back alley - but then she reaches out towards the dumpster nearby, a silver key in her hand and opens an impossible door.

And he remembers.

(It’s bigger on the inside.)


	2. Another Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Because Steffie wanted more, so here we go. You've had a last meeting here's a first!

It smells like the ocean, of ozone and seaweed and rocks baking under a hot sun, and if he squints it even looks like the ocean, what with the little eddies that swirl around his ankles and the horizon ahead of him, straight and true. The sky is green though, and that’s a little harder to explain. Most of his life is, nowadays.

“Well?” she’s bouncing on her toes, her smile wide, twin suns setting her hair ablaze in a riot of blonde and green and lilac as they dip towards to the horizon, “What do you think?”

He thinks he’d better start from the beginning.

\--

Boston, Massachusetts, Earth. November 24th 2015.

It happens on a Tuesday. Most life-changing things do.

He finishes work, such as it is this time of year, locking up the ticket office after a day of steadfastly ignoring the pile of bills that have been growing steadily beneath the letterbox since early October, and pulls his collar up against the bitter wind as he heads away from the frozen dockside and into the city. It’s already getting dark, the streets aglow thanks to the garlands of fairy lights strung between humming streetlight poles and gradually growing brighter as the streetlights themselves click on. That’s where he first notices her, standing in a circle of light and watching the few passersby with a sharp frown. She’s not dressed for the weather, though her suit is sharp she’s hatless, scarfless, coatless. She stands out like a sore thumb next to the bundled up citizens who pass, but none of them seem to notice her. None of them, except him.

_Tourist_ , he thinks as he draws nearer at notices the way she’s worrying her bottom teeth with her lip, _lost, probably_.

“Hey,” he says, gloved hands held out to try and put her at ease, “Are you okay?”

She blinks up at him, and he feels his breath catch because by god she is beautiful. He takes a step back as her frown intensifies and tries very hard not to imagine what her smile might look like.

“You’re British,” she says with a disapproving sniff, “that’s weird.”

He huffs out a laugh - it’s not the worst insult to his nationality he’s ever heard by quite a stretch - and raises an eyebrow at her.

“That’s as may be, but you’re going to catch your death out here, love. Where are you trying to go?”

She crosses her arms over her chest, and looks down at him along her nose as if he’s particularly stupid.

“What’s the date?” she asks sharply, and he starts to wish he hadn’t stopped.

“November 24th. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Damn,” she stamps her foot against the frosty sidewalk, frustration clear in the set of her shoulders, “I’m early.”

“What for?” he asks without really knowing why.

She rolls her eyes, “The _tea party_ of course.”

“The - ” he swallows hard, “the Boston tea party? No taxation without representation and all that?”

He doesn’t think he’s ever had a crazy person look at him like he’s stupid before, but this woman seems to have it down pat in moments.

“No, the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Yes, the Boston tea party!” she snarls, then pouts, disappointment writ large across her lovely face, “Nevermind taxes, taxes are boring, I wanted to watch a fight.”

“I’m afraid you’re a touch late.”

She narrows her eyes at him, looking him up and down as if she’s only just realized he’s physically in front of her, “How late?”

He shrugs, and scratches at a spot below his ear. “Two hundred and fifty years, give or take.”

“Damn,” she groans, the cold finally seeming to get to her as she rubs at her upper arms, “calibrations must be off again, I knew those parts were too cheap to be decent,” she grumbles a little bit under her breath, then looks up at him from under her eyelashes. “That does explain the wig, though.”

“I’m not wearing a wig,” he says, half dumbfounded.

She rolls her eyes again, but this time her lips twitch into an approximation of a smile. “Yeah, genius. That was my point.”

He holds out his hand, and she looks down at it as if it might bite her.

“Killian Jones,” he says, “known genius.”

Gently, so gently, she puts her own hand in his, shaking it lightly as if she’s not entirely sure what to do.

“What’s your name?” he asks, and she looks up at him with a tiny, mysterious smile, a hundred secrets masked by the turn of her lips. He has the strangest urge to kiss her and see if she confesses them all against his mouth.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” she says, and her eyes flash dark as if she’s read his mind,

“You’re mad,” he says, and her smile grows into something wide and beautiful.

“Yes,” she says, her fingers wrapping more tightly around his, “I suppose I am.”

They stand there, hand in hand under the muted glow of the streetlight, for a minute or maybe more. It ought to be awkward - it surely looks awkward to anybody passing - but the streets are abandoned now, and Killian finds himself staring helplessly into this strange woman’s beautiful eyes, the fairy lights of the storefront opposite reflected in their depths like constellations. .

She doesn’t seem alarmed by his somewhat pathetic staring. Instead she just looks back, not as intensely but with a sort of mild interest as if she’s considering him. It’s a little like facing down the company boss at the strangest job interview ever.

“Tell me, Killian Jones,” she says in the sort of low, steady voice used to calm panicked animals, “are you cold?”

“Not as cold as you I expect,” he answers, rubbing his thumb across the back of her hand, “we should - you should - get somewhere warmer.”

She smiles at him, but her eyes are elsewhere now, flickering between the streetlight above them and the empty, darkening street.

“That’s sweet, but really there’s no need. Now listen. Are you _cold_?”

She furrows her brow as if willing him to give her a specific answer, and he racks his brain so as not to disappoint her.

It is cold, colder, perhaps, than he’d been expecting when he left the apartment this morning. His nose is numb, and the edges of his lips are chapping. His scars - large and small - are aching in a way they haven’t for years. Not since his last Arctic run, at any rate. He closes his eyes, and he can smell the ice in the air, the frigid crackle stinging his lungs.

“Yes,” he tells her, eyes still closed, “I am rather.”

When he opens his eyes she’s grinning at him, a sunbeam smile that cracks the frost around his heart even as it spreads thicker beneath their feet.

“Why is it so cold?” he asks, and he means it rhetorically, but she answers with a shrug of one shoulder as she turns away, her hand still tight on his.

“No idea,” she turns back to him with a wink, “wanna find out?”

To the end of the world or time, he thinks wildly as she drags him off.

He has no idea how close he comes.

\--

She laughs at his reminisces, the bell like sound bouncing over the planet’s shimmering surface. Her eyes flashing dark with promise as she pulls him deeper into the ocean. (Is it an ocean? Every time she looks into his eyes it’s like he forgets to ask.)

“That’s not how I remember our beginnings, not really,” she drags him deeper, the evanescent skirts of her dress riding higher, her eyes wider, smile brighter than anything he could have dreamed of seeing before that night, “As I recall, it went a little bit like this.”

She lets the eddies draw them together, lets her eyes flick to his lips, and her tongue run over her teeth.

But that’s another story.


	3. Hope for the Hopeless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emma remembers the first time Killian became more than just a companion to her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Aliens made us do it', sort of. Warning for vague alien drink spiking - this trope is kind of dub-conny? No actual dub-con though.

She knows a lot about humans. She knows a lot about a lot of things. But she’d never bothered to find out much about their social constructs - the habits, and details, and tiny, terribly important pieces of lives lived so excruciatingly briefly - until now. Until him.

Now she’s floating, her culturally appropriate and hideously impractical white dress bobbing on the surface of the closest thing to Earth’s oceans she could find (and she spent forever looking, each new coordinate more displeasing than the last), letting her eyes roam over his stupidly handsome face, wondering why the pinker his cheeks get the more she wants to bite them, and whether she should tell him to keep the tie on.

He tells her their story - his version anyway - where he stumbled across her on a cold winter’s night, and she smiles and lets him tell it, but he was just a man to her then. Funny, and pretty, and prepared to run, just the way she likes them, but that was all he was. A distraction. A companion.

For her, it came later. That moment where it stopped being him and her, and became something greater and deeper, something that made them different, that whispered of ‘us’ and ‘forever’.

It should never have come at all.

–

She loves this part, the moment where they step out of the TARDIS onto a new planet for the first time, the band-aid of human ignorance ripped off as they exhale in disbelief. Killian Jones doesn’t gasp, though. He never has, and it frustrates her almost as much as it intrigues her. He just squeezes her hand tight and smiles down at her with those damnably shrewd blue eyes.

“Why’d you bring me here, love?”

“Oh that’s gratitude,” she scoffs, “I could have taken you to Bognor Regis you know.”

He rubs his foot through the pink fronds that blanket the planet and squints up at the burning sky.

“It’s very pretty,” he says honestly, “but I didn’t have you pegged as the sightseeing sort, so why are we really here?”

He’s barely finished speaking when the ground begins to rumble and shake, setting the golden leaves of the trees shivering and making the TARDIS (a beautiful bronze bush, one of the leaves of which is glinting in his hair) shudder violently. Somewhere, somebody is screaming.

Perfect.

She quirks her brows at Killian and he beams back at her. It makes her hearts stutter like the trembling foliage around them, and that’s new. Very new.

“Danger?” he asks, with a grin like starshine.

“Of course.”

And may all the deities she doesn’t believe in help her regardless, but she likes this one. Has liked him from before he even stepped foot - wide-eyed and all agog - into the Tardis. Likes him so much, in fact, that the automatic countdown to being alone again that she begins every time she hears the words ‘it’s bigger on the inside’ seems louder than ever.

Everything is a countdown to the inevitable for them, and she can’t let herself forget it.

She pulls him along after her, his long legs easily keeping up, and her grip on his hand a little tighter than she normally allows herself.

She has all the time in the world, but it’s never enough. (It has to be.)

They call her the Savior, the pitiably grateful denizens of the societies she helps. It’s a legend she’s cultivated - that of the woman who appears from nowhere in a planet’s darkest hour - but it’s not a title she covets. A role, nothing else. A job. Very little of her life has been her choice.

She enjoys it, of course she does, she knows how lucky she is to be a bearer of light and hope to the hopeless, as opposed to the myriad of other nightmarish things they may have made her, but there’s always that ticking in the back of her mind. Ticking, and a constant ironic ache that she is to spend the rest of her many many days as the universe’s champion of something she barely believes in.

What has hope ever brought her, after all?

Killian stands beside her, his fingers twitching in hers, the rise and fall of his chest quicker than usual as adrenaline still pumps through his veins. She can smell it, her hearts skipping to beat in time with his, and maybe that’s the cruelest cut of all. Hope brought her to him, with his bright eyes and knowing smirks and the way he calls her Swan because “You won’t tell me your name, love, so I chose the most graceful thing I could think of.”

(She can hope forever, but she knows she can’t keep him.)

They’re a tactile race, the ones they’ve saved from destruction today, with long necks and skin that shimmers like mermaid scales, and when they run long, grateful fingers down the side of her face it fills her with a lightness and warmth she hasn’t felt for years.

It makes her smile, let down her guard, and when they ask them to stay for a celebration, well, she doesn’t think to say no.

At first it’s nice - there are sweet, thick drinks that make her tongue tingle and her laugh more of a giggle - and she hardly blinks when Killian is carried off to dance, his stupid human elbows and angles surrounded by the languid curves of their hosts as they move and sway around him. It makes her feel warm, soft, happy in a way she can’t remember feeling for lifetimes. She reaches for another drink, and keeps her eyes on the way the shimmer of his partners scales reflect against his skin til he’s shimmering golden and beautiful and - what the fuck is in these drinks?

The dance seems to speed up, colours and bodies swirling together until they’re one, and her hearts speed up right along with it. Killian is just a flash of leather jacket now, a brief glimpse of ruffled dark hair all she sees before a glowing hand reaches out to pet at it. She drops her glass to step towards the whirling maelstrom, heat and anger building in her belly as she catches another of the creatures lifting a hand towards Killian’s face.

 _Mine_.

Two of the dancers swirl closely past her, bodies entwined and clothes twisted, their colours merging where they touch, and her anger is replaced by a flash of desire so strong it almost brings her to her knees.

Killian catches her eye, and begins making his way to the edge of the dancers, his eyes dark and laser focuses on her own, his shirt disheveled.

Oh.

She reaches out, grabs him by the lapels, and pulls him free of the crowd with enough force to send them both tumbling to the ground.

“I think,” he says raggedly, “that there might be something a bit odd about this place.”

“What do you mean?” She asks, more breathless than she has any right to be, her inner voice screaming words she doesn’t care to translate.

“Do you feel,” he licks his lips, and she watches the movement closely, “a little strange?”

“It’s not the word I’d use,” she says, and means it.

She might be an alien as far as he’s concerned, but she isn’t an idiot. She can see the dilation of his pupils when she smiles at him, hear the uptick in his heart rate when she takes his hand in hers, and here amongst the pink ferns she can almost feel the way his arousal hovers, heady and tempting, in the little space between them. She’s not an idiot, and she’s no innocent, she knows what want looks like on the faces of dozens of different species, she just wasn’t expecting it to look so different on him.

She wasn’t expecting to feel it mirrored in herself.

“I think we should probably go,” his voice is strained, his fingers clenching and unclenching in the space next to her hip as their hosts continue their dance, “next adventure, yeah?”

She swallows - her throat is dry, and that’s a first too - and tries to get up, but she only makes it as far as her knees before she’s sinking back into the soft foliage.

“That might be rude,” she manages, even as she frantically tries to move her feet, “I mean, they are hosting a party for us.”

“Swan,” he groans, “I _really_ think this is a particular _type_ of party. Specifically, the naked sort.”

“You think I’ve brought you to an alien orgy,” she half scoffs.

He doesn’t say anything to that, just lifts one eyebrow as one of their hosts passes close by, a long sinuous arm reaching out towards them, the fingertips glowing gold and pink as they pass by, clothes slipping from their body. Killian swallows hard, and she can feel the bob of his adam’s apple right down to her bones.

What the hell was in those drinks?

“On second thoughts,” she says, as lightly as possible with what feels like a fire in her belly, her hands trembling with the urge to touch, “maybe they’d like some privacy.”

(She’d like some privacy, all right. Just enough privacy to suck his lip between her teeth and bite and… yeah, they really need to get out of here.)

She manages to force her hand into her inner pocket even though all it seems to want to do is crawl up Killian’s thigh, her fingers finally curling around her screwdriver and damn it they’d really like to be curled around something else too.

They lie on the grates for a moment as the TARDIS answers her call and materializes around them - Killian at least seems to be having some trouble catching his breath - and she lets the soothing hum of the core calm her frantic pulse.

“It’ll wear off,” she assures him, her eyes still tightly shut because one look at that profile and she doesn’t know what will happen, “I suspect they’re an empathetic race and they slipped us some emotional roofies.”

“Emotions, right,” Killian still seems to be struggling with his words, “is that why I want to fuck you up against the console til you scream?”

Her eyes snap open, he looks mortified, but there’s a thin sheen of sweat on his brow and his colour is high from more than just embarrassment.

“Shit, Swan, I’m sorry, I didn’t…”

“It’s fine,” she says, the breathlessness back in her voice, “it’ll wear off soon, it’s…”

“It won’t,” he scrunches his face up as if trying to keep the words in, but they pour out of him regardless, “God, it won’t. Don’t you know how beautiful you are?”

Her usual retort is on the tip of her tongue - I’m nobody’s god and I’m not here to be pretty - but something stops her. Maybe she’s still drunk on whatever they had back on the planet, maybe she just wants to see what he does, maybe, just maybe, she knows exactly how he feels, but the reasoning hardly matters. Only the words.

Only the choice.

(Hope for the hopeless.)

“Yeah?” she breathes, moving closer, closer until she can feel the heat of his body against her skin and all she want to do is burn, “Show me.”


	4. Anatomy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was supposed to be smuttier than it is, but they got kinda coy on me.

That's the thing about living more or less forever. You sure get about a bit. 

She's taken her pleasure a hundred thousand times in a hundred thousand places, and given it too, her memory reeling with ecstatic faces she can't recall and names she's sure she never knew. She might have loved one or two of them, if circumstances had been different. If she hadn't been who she is, perhaps. Her lives have been a succession of maybes and if onlys, and although sex may not be a biological imperative for her people it's a hell of a way to scratch the loneliest itch.

It's not like there's anyone left to judge her, any how.

So there's nothing unique about the way Killian's body feels against hers as he crushes her against the gratings. Nothing unusual about the way he tastes, or the desperate little sounds he makes when she tugs at his hair. The heat and the ache between her thighs are familiar, precursors to an ancient dance that have given so many societies life. It's familiar, and then Killian pulls away from her with a gasp, scrabbling away on his knees as if she's bitten him, and suddenly it's not. 

(She doesn't think she has, but then she hadn't thought him the type to mind.)

“What's wrong?” She asks, still lying on the floor as if he might decide to drive back in, “if you're worried about practicality then don't, I promise everything works the same way.”

Killian's eyes, which have been lust blown and unfocused, snap to her own. To her consternation he looks almost angry.

“You think I'm worried about the bloody physics of the thing? We've just been roofied by aliens and here I am rutting on you like…”

“I like the rutting,” she says brightly, “you can do some more of that.”

“Swan,” he moans, but not in the way she wants to hear, “I want to do this right, I want to…”

She sits up at this, something leaden and unpleasant settling in her stomach.

“It's just sex,” she says, “it doesn't matter.”

Killian blanches, face falling as if she's slapped him.

“Right,” he says carefully to disguise the tremor, “of course.”

He gets unsteadily to his feet, wiping his palms on the thighs of his jeans, his eyes settling on anything but her.

“You know, I think that stuff’s wearing off now. I think I might go for a shower. Cool off a little.”

He's gone before she can think to call after him, disappearing into the bowels of the TARDIS who hums in sympathy.

“I don't know what you're so sweet on him for,” she grouses as she clambers to her feet, “you're supposed to be on my side.”

She tinkers for a little while, letting the sound of the TARDIS distract her from her frustration and soothe the ache that has shifted from her loins to her chest. Killian doesn't return.

At first she thinks that perhaps he was telling the truth, and that his desire for her had flared and died under the instruction of some alien liqueur. She thinks that he might be embarrassed. She tries not to think about the sharp twist in her gut that comes when she imagines Killian rejecting her. It feels like panic, and she’s not sure what to make of that.

But then, as time drags by and he doesn't reappear, she thinks that maybe he lied. Maybe she hadn't imagined the way his eyes grow darker when he looks at her. Maybe the way he holds on to her hand isn't purely because he cannot be trusted not to wander into trouble.

Maybe it isn't only sex to him. Maybe it isn't to her, either.

Maybe she doesn't know what that means, but maybe she should tell him anyway. 

It's a lot of maybes.

Eventually she runs out of things to poke at and prod, the TARDIS running at optimum levels just to thwart her, and it's boredom along with that nagging ache that sends her off to find him.

He's in the library, his back to the door, something large and complicated looking open in his lap.

“You're like a sponge,” she says, softening the teasing tone until she knows how he’s feeling, “you'll know more than me someday, I can tell.”

He closes the book, pushing it onto the small table in front of him, but he doesn't turn towards her, his voice tightly controlled when he speaks.

“Doesn't seem very likely. I don't even know your name.”

“Killian - ”

“Don’t.” He sighs, running a slightly shaking hand through his hair, “Just don’t”  
“Don’t what?” She steps towards him, doing her best to ignore the way he keeps his body turned away from here.

“Don’t…” he lifts his hands towards the ceiling in a futile gesture for help, before letting them drop to his thighs. “I can’t do this any more, I’m sorry.”

She keeps up her cautious approach until she’s standing right before him, her own hands twisting nervously in front of her. “Do you want me to take you back?” 

He looks at her like she’s mad. He looks at her like she’s mad quite a lot of the time, if she’s honest, but never quite like this.

“You want me to leave?” 

And although she’d struggled to keep the fear out of her own question, it’s nothing to the terror in his voice.

“No!” It comes out sharper than she’d meant it to, but she can hardly help it. Not with her own hearts screaming at her and the dread in his eyes. “No Killian, I don’t want you to leave.”

“So why did you..?” he gestures vaguely at her. She shrugs, uncomfortable under the weight of his stare.

“You said you couldn’t do this anymore.”

“I didn’t mean,” he drops his chin to his chest, defeated, “I want things I shouldn’t want, Swan.”

Well, she knows a thing or two about that alright.

“What sort of things?”

She hates how needy she sounds, but not nearly as much as she hates the way he refuses to look at her, speaking instead to the ratty care-worn rung at his feet.

“The sort of things it’s bad form to do with a woman if you don’t even know her name.”

She drops to her knees, maneuvering herself so that she’s knelt between his thighs, tilting her head up just so, so that he can’t avoid her gaze any longer.

“I can’t tell you,” she says, urging him to believe her, “I can’t. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just…”

He gives his head a little shake, and lets one side of his mouth quirk up into the smallest of smiles.

“A rule?”

She rolls her eyes, but smiles back. “Probably the only one I keep, right?”

“Right,” he sighs, and the little smile falls away. 

There’s a moment where she just sort of stares at him, building her courage up as she examines the way the glow of the library fire casts his jaw into sharp relief, until she feels his thigh muscles tense under the pressure of her fingers and she knows that if she doesn’t speak now he’ll stand and leave. She’s done with people leaving.

“Killian,” she asks softly, pressing him down into the cushions with the palms of her hands, “What sort of things?”

He sits back in the chair, scratching nervously at the back of his neck, and she feels fire build in her belly as he licks at his lips.

”You don’t…” he begins, but she cuts him off with a shake of her head, her body rising to follow the movement of his own.

“It’s worn off. It’s worn off and I don’t think it really worked on me in the first place,” she smiles, flushing at the way he seems to sit up a little straighter, his eyes roving over her face as if searching for a lie that isn’t there.

“We are hurtling through space and time together. It could get pretty awkward if you change your mind,” he says with a sort of faux casualness that she hates. 

She would be annoyed that he doesn't seem to think she knows her own mind, but wasn't it just hours ago she’d been denying what this meant? Could mean. Will mean. 

Nothing about him has ever been meaningless to her, not really, and maybe she owes it to him to prove it.

She surges against him, her teeth a little sharper than she’d meant them to be against the softness of his lower lip, her hands a little rougher, a little more desperate, as they take hold of his and drag them under her shirt and against her sides.

“I won’t.“

For a moment he’s stiff and unyielding, his hands stiff and his jaw locked tight, but just as she thinks that maybe she’s misjudged this all along his hand begin to move, one sliding hotly up her back, fingertips skimming underneath her bra, the other dropping low to pull her fully into his lap until she can feel how much he wants her, thick and hard against the seam of her pants.

(“How long are you going to stay with me?” she asks later, sweat slicked and naked, the old library rug rucked up beneath them and the chair long overturned.

“Forever,” he says, and slides home.)

\--

“You only want me for my body,” he says, grinning as she straddles him at the shoreline, her wet dress clinging to the lines of her body as she rips at the sodden buttons of his dress shirt.

“This second rate thing? Please.” She stretches above him, lets him watch the way the light turns her hair into a halo as she pulls the dress over her head, “When I’ve got this one to play with?” 

He almost whimpers as she runs her hand down, down over her stomach to disappear between her thighs, and she files that noise away with the way his breath catches short as she grinds down, with the flush on his skin when she finally tears the shirt away, with the giggle he can’t keep in when she leaves the tie exactly where it is. She files them all away, and then leans down to breathe a single word into his ear.

“ _Emma_.”

(Somewhere, a bell is tolling.)


	5. Ouroboros

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time is a cycle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading this weird little crossover, I've really enjoyed writing it! I was aiming for bittersweet here, but I think I ended up in 'pain and tragedy' territory instead. Sorry.

The first time she loses him is the worst.

It's not that she doesn't expect it, oh no, but perhaps it's the way it happens. They're in fucking medieval Brittany, with streets full of shit, and a deranged feudal Lord after their heads. His hand in hers and they're running running running and then…

There’s the swish of steel through the air and an ungodly scream, and then they’re not. They’re not running. She's kneeling and he's bleeding and the man who’d wielded the sword lies face down and twitching in an open sewer, the screwdriver buzzing and hot in her shaking fingers.

She claws at Killian, rolling him towards her and trying not to cringe at the damp splat he makes against the cobblestones. He’s clutching his left arm to his chest, his face rapidly losing colour as the blood pours and pours from the space where his hand used to be. The hand she’d been holding.

“Run,” he gasps out, a terrible bubbling rattle following the words, “Emma, run!”

She shakes her head, hovering the screwdriver uselessly over his wrist and wishing, wishing, wishing that they were somewhere, anywhere, else. Fucking leeches aren’t going to cut it here.

“I got him,” she says, without dwelling on what that really means, “I got him and I’ve got you, you’re going to be fine, you’re going to be - “

He coughs, and blood sputters across her shirt.

“I love you.”

She almost punches him, even in his weakened state it’s a near run thing.

“You promised,” she hisses, tears spilling out to mix with the blood between the stones, “forever, remember?”

“Yeah,” his voice fades out, weak but soft. Happy, almost, “I wouldn’t have changed it for anything.”

He closes his eyes, and she tightens her grip on the screwdriver and wills the TARDIS to them.

Fuck forever. She has no time for a forever that looks like death.

She leaves him in the hospital, in his own time, in his own city, only weeks after she first met him. Walking away before she can change her mind, with nothing but the tears on her face and a ring burning ridges into her finger bones, she wills herself to forget.

It’s not that easy, of course. She throws her wedding ring into a dying star, choking on stardust and ashes and tears, and wills the burning away. Avoids every room the TARDIS tries to show her, forces a smile for strangers, and makes sure that that’s how they stay. Strange to her as she’s strange to them. 

At night she still feels the fingers of a phantom hand in hers.

\--

(He comes to in hospital having lost three weeks of memories and his left hand. He always feels like maybe he lost more than he ever had to begin with.

He dreams of gold and starlight and wakes alone.)

\--

She's like a boomerang. If boomerangs could cry.

Avoiding him, avoiding the memory of him, is an impossible task that just adds to the ache that never goes away. Even the TARDIS agrees, sending her to coordinates so familiar they set her heart alight and her eyes to burning. For the longest time she can’t even bear to open the doors, but then, well, then she figures if she can’t hide from the hurt maybe she can drown in it now and then.

She revisits the ocean they married by, the first society they saved, every star field he ever kissed her by the light of, happy memories that make her smile, small and wistful, but a smile nonetheless. She even crosses her own timeline to save her ring from the fire, making sure to leave it in the shop window just in time for his mother to choose it. She doesn’t torture herself, though. She never goes back to Brittany. She never goes back to Boston.

Until she does.

She gets the date wrong, or right, it's hard to say when you weren't even trying to begin with, and finds him two years later. 

It's a gorgeous day. He's out on his boat, the sun glinting off the prosthetic he wears now, and she only meant to look. Just look, just once, but then he catches her eyes and smiles.

She's seen all the wonders of the universe, twice, but none of them ever compared to his smile.

“Killian,” she breathes, “Killian, I'm sorry.”

His brow quirks in that way she always loved, and it's all she can do not to run her thumb over the line of it.

“Do I know you, love?”

(Time’s a funny thing.

He thinks she's a dream, blonde hair and stars in her eyes, and maybe she is.)

“Not yet,” she says, “but you will.”

\--

The second time she loses him it's her own fault.

She tries, she really does. They live in a clapboard house with a kitchen and a keurig, and the world still throbs and turns beneath them no matter how long they stand still. It’s perfect and human and safe. It’s awful.

She feels the hum of the Earth through the soles of her feet as she stands out under the stars and some nights she hates it, but most nights she hates herself more.

She tries and she tries, but she can't be what he is, mortal and frail and perfectly human, and she daren’t make him hers, not while she can still remember the way that his blood feels under her knees.

She leaves one night in the not-quite garden shed, and breaks her own heart in the process.

\--

(She breaks his, too.)

\--

The third time, she does it properly.

The clapboard house is up for sale, and his eyes are shadowed, dark circles on too pale skin when she appears on the porch, his mother’s ring in the palm of her hand and a heart too heavy with guilt to stay away. 

He lets her in, which she wasn't expecting, and she tells him the truth, which she expected even less.

And then, almost as if he's doing it to irritate her, he believes her. 

“Let me come with you.”

He takes her hands in his, and she can see her reflection in the steel where once there was flesh. 

“I can't.”

“But before - “

She shakes her head, watching the way plastic fingers don't tremble.

“I was stupid. Too stupid. I knew what would happen and I loved you anyway.”

He scoffs, pushing her hands away.

“You loved me? You're talking about me like I was a pet! You can't make these choices for me, Emma. You can't -”

“I can't lose you,” she pleads, as if that makes it okay.

It doesn't. His face twists into a sneer.

“You already did,” he spits, and the door rattles on the hinges as he slams it behind her.

\--

(He finds her standing in the garden on a damp April dawn, with the shed six feet from where it should be, and tear tracks drying on her cheeks.

She tells him the truth, and he believes her.

She tells him she can't lose him, so she doesn't.

The shed’s bigger on the inside.)

\--

The fourth time, he dies in her arms.

Old age, they call it, though it seems barely a blink to her. He's smiling when he breathes his last, rheumy eyes fixed on hers to the end, and she smiles back.

His was a good life. Hers goes on. That's what forever looks like, she supposes. It always looks like death.

She never goes back to Boston. Not in that lifetime. No matter how much the TARDIS cries and strains to send her there. 

He lived his forever, the least she can do for him is live hers.

\--

(She’s the last thing he sees, still gold and starlight, still smiling through the darkness pressing at his edges.

Still a dream come true.)

\--

The last time, she chooses the face she'll always think of as his. Blonde hair, green eyes and that little cleft in her chin.

She primps in front of the mirror in that tux he'd once loved, lines her lips in siren red and wonders mildly at the way seven hundred years can burn to ashes in the fire of regeneration and still show so clearly in her eyes.

Twelve lifetimes, come and gone, and this, this is the last. This is her forever. She's always known where she's going to spend it.

The TARDIS hums with joy when she finally lets her have her head, materialising in an alleyway on a miserable January night. If she's counted correctly then it's been a month since he woke up in the hospital with no memory of her, a week since he came home missing the best part of a month and his left hand, but nothing prepares her for the way her heart leaps and her breath catches to see him propping up the grotty bar, miserable and drunk, and more beautiful than she remembers.

She slides into the stool beside him, her hand making its way to his knee almost of its own will, and watches the way his mouth moves when he grumbles something about mugs.

“How about a kidnapping?” she asks, and his eyes flash, young and bright and beautiful.

And it doesn't matter, not anymore, how many times she loses him, not as long as she finds him. And she always finds him.

They're a fixed point, after all.


End file.
